Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Earlier draft dossier revealed

More lies exposed

Chris Ames

Published 23 August 2007

Observations on WMD

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New evidence shows how the government misled both the Hutton Inquiry and the Butler Review about the genesis of the dossier. There was an even earlier version of the document than Foreign Office press secretary John Williams's "missing" draft, whose existence was revealed in the NS last November.

The revelations have prompted fresh calls for the government to come clean about the document that took Britain to war in Iraq.

The new evidence is the full text of a letter that the government sent the Hutton Inquiry when it was forced to hand over the John Williams draft, having initially sought to conceal it. Conservative MP John Baron has obtained a copy of the letter under the Freedom of Information Act. Foreign Office minister Kim Howells had previously sent Baron a redacted copy of the letter with four and a half lines of text blacked out on the grounds that it was "sensitive".

The newly disclosed text reveals that Williams wrote his draft on 7 and 8 September 2002, based on an electronic copy of an even earlier document sent to him by the Coalition Information Committee (CIC). That document "held text on Iraqi WMD drafted by the [Joint Intelligence Committee] assessments staff" as well as historical material from the Foreign Office. This shows that the CIC was initally responsible for incorporating the two strands of material into a single document, following Campbell’s first meeting to plan the dossier on 5 September.

The CIC was a propaganda unit set up by Campbell to promote UK involvement in US-led wars. This is the first time that the CIC has appeared in the evidence trail for the September dossier...